I recently wrote about our newest project, A Pocket Guide to Cleaner Air, a book that educates those in the commercial real estate market about how to help their office clients pick and care for plants that can help make their indoor air cleaner and their workers more productive and healthier. Today, I’m going to show off one of the steps the National Association of REALTORS® is taking to help make our office environment in Chicago better. Just like the steps that IREM has taken towards the WELL standard, we are hoping that these plants are a start towards thinking about the indoor space we spend our time in every day. That step is a plant wall, installed on the 4th Floor of NAR’s HQ, which aims to clean our air of CO2 and VOCs to help make the IT department a healthier place.

Plant Wall in the IT department at NAR

We’ve covered a lot of the benefits of putting plants in indoor spaces on posts before, but to reiterate, we spend about 90% of our time indoors, and the EPA estimates that indoor air quality is 5-10x worse than outdoor air quality! At NAR, we can’t just open up our office windows to try to get in some air, so we need to take measures to help make the air that we are circulating (and recirculating) be as fresh as possible, so we enlisted our friends at Plant Parenting here in Chicago to think of a solution to get some of the plants from the NASA Clean Air Study into our office space. We have pretty typical cubicle walls, with paneling that can be taken out and replaced with different materials, so after measuring the paneling, we discovered we could actually fit some trays right into our walls! Howard at Plant Parenting was able to install this wall for us in a morning, including putting in all the plants. We have 4 kinds of air-purifying plants along the wall, which I will describe below with their benefits.

There are 4 different plants that purify the air in these trays!

First up we have dracaena warneckii, a plant that cleans benzene, formaldehyde and trichloroethylene. The warneckii is a bushy plant native to tropical Africa, but it can also grow quite tall depending on the variety. We have the bushy warneckii, because they do not weigh much and thus won’t put a ton of strain on our cubicle walls. We also have a second type of dracaena called dracaena marginata, which comes in a variety of colors and shapes. Marginata not only cleans benzene, formaldehyde and toluene, but also is considered one of the best for cleaning xylene and trichloroethylene. These dracaena are native to Madagascar and other islands in the Indian Ocean. Next up is the Money Plant, and while it won’t make you rich, it will clean benzene, formaldehyde, xylene, and toluene. It is native to French Polynesia. It is one of the hardest houseplants to kill, hence its other name, Devil’s Ivy. Finally, we have a tropical plant from New Guinea called Chinese evergreen, which is said to bring good luck to those who grow it! We’re lucky it will be filtering benzene and formaldehyde out of our air. All of these plants will convert CO2 to breathable oxygen for us as well.

Devil’s Ivy close up

We’ll be monitoring our indoor air quality using the sensors we’ve been building in the lab, and seeing how all our hard work getting the right plants together pays off. We’ll keep you all posted, and hope that our results inspire you to start putting plants in your own offices. And stay tuned for more info about our Pocket Guide to Cleaner Air!

Update: you can buy the Pocket Guide to Cleaner Air: Plants for Commercial Spaces for $14.99 now! Click here to be directed to the product page.

Click To Buy Now!

Over the past few months, CRT Labs, along with NAR’s Library and Information Technology staff, have been researching and developing a series of books about indoor air quality and plants you can grow in order to keep your air fresh and clean. The first in this Pocket Guide series is a book specifically aimed for commercial practitioners, and will educate REALTORS® about the best plants to advise their clients to buy for improving the indoor air quality of different office spaces. Further guides will dive into different residential air quality concerns.

In the late 70s and early 80s, NASA began evaluating a variety of plants on their space stations to help clean the air onboard of not only carbon dioxide, but also from gases called volatile organic compounds. These gases, when contained and allowed to circulate in an indoor space, can lead the building’s occupants to contract a variety of illnesses. NASA identified 31 plants in their Clean Air Study as some of the best filters for these contaminants. We single out 10 of these plants due to their high ratings in the Clean Air Study as well as their availability at home and garden centers to focus on in our Pocket Guide. The book examines the best plants that work together to mitigate common indoor air quality issues in commercial spaces, teaches how to take care of these new plants, and includes rich color photographs of each plant discussed. Look for the book coming out in late spring or early summer this year, but until then, enjoy this excerpt from the book! These two paragraphs are from chapter two, titled “Thinking About the Air You Breathe.”

The average person spends around 90% of their time indoors, and the EPA estimates that indoor air quality can be two to five times more polluted than the air outdoors. This rise in indoor pollution is partially due to the fact that office design has shifted towards materials that release volatile organic compounds into the air. Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, are found in almost all the materials in your buildings, especially in new construction – including the furniture, carpets, paints, cleaning products, and more. Buildings, which are more energy efficient than ever before, have tighter seals and are better constructed, which traps any pollution created indoors, or brought from the outdoors, in the building itself. These factors contribute to these higher levels of VOCs, as well as CO2, in the indoor air. Even while indoor air filtration systems are in use, VOCs can remain and continue to off-gas into the indoor environment.

VOCs, CO2, and other indoor environmental factors all contribute to sick building syndrome, which the National Institutes of Health define as “various nonspecific symptoms that occur in the occupants of a building… [which] increases sickness absenteeism and causes a decrease in productivity of the workers”. The symptoms of sick building syndrome include headache, dizziness, nausea, eye/nose/throat irritations, dry cough, dry/itching skin, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, sensitivity to odors, hoarseness of voice, allergies, cold/flu-like symptoms, asthma, and personality changes. Looking at this list, there’s an overlap in symptoms that are commonly associated with high levels of CO2 and VOCs in the air, meaning that sick building syndrome is likely brought on by these very gases.